Trying to balance the ed with the tech

The business of textbooks or why do students prefer print?

Students prefer print.

Julie K. Bartley, an associate professor of geology and chair of the geology department at Gustavus Adolphus College, hears the sentiment from her undergraduates. “Our students don’t really want to have e-books,” Ms. Bartley says. Chronicle of Higher Ed

It is becoming quite clear that, despite the ubiquity of computers and interactive technology in their lives, students preferred textbooks over e-books for learning

But why is that? Why do students seem to prefer printed textbooks to electronic ones? Says Ms. Bartley:

“What I hear from them a lot of times is that they feel some sort of comfort in being able to hold the thing in their hands.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

and

Based on these results, we argue that at this time the medium itself may not be as comfortable as a textbook experience for readers (Woody et al)

I don’t want to minimize the tactile experience of reading a physical book, and I do acknowledge that there are some pedagogical qualities of a physical book things that are easier to do in print than electronic, like flip back and forth quickly between pages to help connect concepts located at different parts of the book. But I sometimes think this reason is given far too much importance when we examine student format preferences and we are missing out on an equal, if not more, important factor biasing student format preference.

Economics.

Most of the studies that have looked at student textbook format preferences have compared a publishers resource to itself; a publishers printed textbook versus the same publishers electronic offering. And when you look at the economics behind this choice, it’s easy to see why students might pick print over electronic. As Kent Anderson’s points out, from a student perspective, the economics of e-text vs print just does not make sense when it comes to publishers textbooks.

For the vast majority of students, print textbooks are economically superior to e-books simply because there’s a robust used book market for expensive print textbooks. Buy them new, sell them back. Want them cheaper? Buy them used. The market is much more favorable and robust.

As an example, would I buy a $52 e-book when I can buy a $115 print book that has, as its low offer, a used price of $84? With print, I can essentially “rent” a textbook for a semester for $31, an economic edge of $21 over the e-book — and with no upfront cost of an e-reader.

In other words, it is cheaper for a student to buy a textbook and sell that used textbook to recoup costs. There is a market for used textbooks. There is no market for a used e-text version.

Not that you could sell your e-text version even if there was a market because students don’t actually own the e version of the publishers textbook. The publishers don’t “sell” e-texts – they lease access to them, usually for 180 days. Even if a student wants to keep the textbook, they cannot. After 4-6 months, they lose access to the e-textbook.

But yet this fall, students will feel an even stronger push from publishers to choose e-text over print even though they are not buying them.Why would publishers continue to push formats that students don’t want?

Simply put – to undercut the used textbook market. Publishers don’t make money from the sale of used textbooks, so they are eager to see the print market dry up and for students to adopt e-text. So there is an economic incentive for publishers to kill off physical textbooks and push e-texts on students, who are balking at the terms they are offering and rejecting their expensive e-text. Plus, e-text versions make collecting data about students use of the textbooks possible, something they can’t do with print versions of the textbook. And there is gold in that there data.

Yet, offer a free and open text and then it is a vastly different story – students will choose the free and open electronic version of a textbook over low cost printed version.

Lindshield & Adhikari created an electronic textbook (they called it a flexbook) for a Human Nutrition course and found that, even though low cost print on demand versions of the book were available, students (whether on campus or online) overwhelmingly chose the electronic version.

Campus
(n = 93)

Online (n = 102)

Primary way of using the flexbook

Google Docs version shared to Gmail or K-State Google account

23 (24.7%)

20 (19.6%)

Web version (accessed through link)

24 (25.8%)

14 (13.7%)*

PDF (downloaded)

43 (46.2%)

51 (50.0%)

Hard copy (self-printed or purchased from vendor)

3 (3.2%)

17 (16.7%)**

Second most common way of using the flexbook

Google Docs version shared to Gmail or K-State Google account

13 (14.0%)

20 (19.6%)

Web version (accessed through link)

23 (24.7%)

13 (12.7%)*

PDF (downloaded)

21 (22.6%)

20 (19.6%)

Hard copy (self-printed or purchased from vendor)

3 (3.2%)

5 (4.9%)

Flexbook used in only one way

33 (35.5%)

44 (43.1%)

Research from Hilton & Laman (2012 paywall) shows a similar student preference for electronic vs print, with 62% of students choosing a free online version of the textbook compared to a low cost print on demand version of the same textbook (n=307). Incidentally, the Hilton & Laman research, like previous research, showed that students who used the free open textbook scored higher on departmental final examinations, had higher grade point averages in the class and had higher retention rates than those students who used a traditional text).

Now, there is a certain “d’uh” quality to this – free wins is kind of a no-brainer. But, for me, it shows just how powerful the economic argument is when it comes to student format preference. Which is why I think that when it comes to discussions as to whether students prefer one format over the other, we need to look closely at the economic terms being offered to students for those electronic resources and see whether the students are rejecting the format, or the terms being offered to them to use that format.

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Wrangler of learning technologies by day, Dad, cyclist, soccer fan and, lately, home roaster of coffee by night. INFJ. I am the Manager of Open Education at BCcampus, working primarily on open education projects. This blog is a personal blog and do not reflect the opinions of BCcampus.

7 Comments

Many students seem to think that they will prefer electronic textbooks, but very few actually end up using them. The same is true for electronic course notes. Reading on most screens (with the exception of e-ink screens) is very tiring on the eyes, and makes extended, in-depth reading difficult.

Longevity and durability I think these are the key missing reasons for why people prefer paper. They don't have confidence that a digital copy will be around for a year, let along the three years or more they might want to keep the book. Licencing v ownership is part of this, also the concern that they might run out of batteries at a crucial time, break their storage device, not want to carry an expensive ebook reader with them every time and every place they could take a dog eared book with post-it notes sticking out. There is a concern that digital copies are too fragile, and are held as software within an expensive non disposable device. They'd more likely risk taking the book to the beach (and stuffing it in a bag while they go swimming and partying by the fire afterwards) than a laptop/ebook reader. Until the hosting hardware device is seen as being as rugged and durable as a book, the book is the safer and more reliable option.

I’ve always preferred print. For one thing, you can highlight/draw/doodle/take notes on pages, without worrying if you own a compatible platform or if the reader software supports the features.

and there’s no DRM. the book is mine. it’s not a license to read a book for a semester, nor a non-transferrable-license-that-costs-as-much-as-buying-the-book. sure, 90% of my books got recycled because there was no resale value on old content…

the ebooks in our library have limits on the number of people who can check them out (seriously) and even have a limit on the number of times they can be checked out before “falling apart” (seriously!). So we’d still need to buy a bunch of copies of a book to put in the library as ebooks, and hope that students have compatible readers, and that they check them back in, etc…

I don't disagree that paper is easier. What bothers me is that it is easier in large part because the business of books (restrictive DRM and limits on copies available, like you mention) conspire to make it easier, regardless of whether one format is "better" than another (of which I am less inclined to care whatever format floats someones boat – print, electronic, birch bark parchment, whatever works for you to learn from use it). We shouldn't be accepting those kinds of licensing restrictions and students, when they report that they prefer print over electronic, are basing their decision on those restrictions and not just over format preference.

Here's a question – of ALL the textbooks you have ever purchased in your life (K-12, HS, undergrad, grad), how many do you still have today? How many have you looked at in the past 2 years? My answer = 1 or 2, but I gave up trying to find what I was looking for and looked it up on Wikipedia where the article was better than I remember it from the textbook.

Irwin DeVries says:

Right on the money. Another perspective to think about is curriculum development and maintenance. Having commercial e-texts with 180 day lifecycles gives publishers almost complete control over textbook lifecycles – when to terminate editions and introduce new ones. This leaves little recourse for hanging on to older editions for a few years at the discretion of instructors who may see the changes as trivial. At this point the tail is really wagging the dog, unless of course we're talking free/open texts, where faculty and developers can adapt texts to their own needs and control versioning.

Catherine Novak says:

I'm currently a student using both print and e-texts. If money were no object, right now the printed text would win. Why? First, I can keep a print text, as stated in the article. In fact, I shelled out good money for an excellent textbook that I knew I would want to keep on my reference shelf long after I have finished my MA. Second, I can take my printed textbook to places without wi-fi, like my workplace (yes, it must be one of the last without wi-fi, but there you go. If I worked in a school in SD61 I'd be wi-fi-less as well, but that's a comment for another post). Third, I get precious little extra value in the text for the inconvenience of reading it online. Why can't I zoom in on the maps? Where are the links? Why doesn't it at least read like a Wikipedia article and give me places to go for more detail? Why is it written in such a linear fashion? In all, I want my e-learning materials to be less text-y and more web-by. Is that such a hard standard to achieve? Sometimes, the e-book gives LESS than the print text, by being less navigable, by illustrations being missing or taking too long to expand, or because of a hard-to-read font.